Been playing for 24 years and this is the first time I've broken a piano string.

Chad Lindhorst: Not even a small one.

Adam Blinkinsop: Yowch. Loud when it broke? Didn't get hurt, I hope.

Blake O'Hare: Someone once told me it would be as loud as a shotgun but when it happened it was actually fairly uncinematic and I only heard a small pop and the wire jostling around for a half second. Since the hammers are nearest to me the string recoiled away from me so no damage to me.

Blake O'Hare: Hmm...I'm usually suspicious of handing over circle rights to 3rd party apps (using my own tools against me!) but I suppose it's for a noble cause. Apparently it only posts the score at the moment you achieve it, so my 113 is lost forever but I got an 82 so that'll have to do for now, although I'll try to get another triple digit later.

Blake O'Hare: It took about 6 tries but I finally got it back to triple digits. The key is to forget the fact that you're an uncontrollably oscillating bird that natural selection should have taken care of long ago (honestly, I think he's the fish from Super Mario Bros). Ignore the bird and pretend there's a small invisible vertically-oriented rectangular bounding box around the range where the bird oscillates. When you tap at a rhythm to maintain roughly the same altitude, this box is completely stationary. When you slow the tapping rate, the box moves down slowly. When you speed up the tapping rate, the box moves up slowly. Basically each time you tap, you're declaring where the bottom of this stably-moving bounding box will be for the next quarter second. After that, it's helpful to try to establish a rhythm such that you are tapping when the bird first enters the gap between the pipes which allows for quick dives in the event that the pipe is really high and the next pipe is really low. To re-establish a rhythm, dive a bit and then climb back up by tapping rapidly while ensuring that the last tap in the climb is when you're about a jump's width to the left of the pipe opening and at an altitude aligned with the top opening of the bottom pipe.

Geofrey Sanders: That was too complicated. Maybe you could express it in terms of Fourier analysis and curves in phase space instead?